Industrial food in America

The older I get, I continue to marvel at how little I truly comprehend the level of "fucked-upness" that pervades the culture I'm trapped living in the midst of. Take for instance, food--or something closely resembling the industrial approximation that comprises the diet of average Americans.

Writing about food is a lot like writing about religion. Americans generally know little about either topic, but that doesn't stop them from getting offended when you broach the subject. Better, both topics are chock full of misinformation, myth, and downright destructive ideologies.

I just got done listening to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, on CD. I'd read most of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and have consistently sought out his columns in the New York Times and other places, writing about food in America. Pollan regularly has stated that the food system in our country is a matter of national importance. It rarely is framed, however, in almost any political debate, or discussion.

What I love about Pollan is that his writing on the topic hits us right between the eyes, like when he wrote back in July, in the New York Times Magazine “How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.” Food, like just about everything else in our land of make-believe has become just another spectator sport.

Because Americans have become ahistorical, Pollan's thoughts and ideas seem new, and somewhat offputting to anyone that thinks high fructose corn syrup is one of the essential food groups. Actually, others have firmly tamped this ground before, writers like Wendell Berry, before Pollan, and Joan Gussow both understood the connection between dietary health and its connection to our agriculture, and policies that drive it. One can even go back further to Sir Albert Howard, British botanist and organic farming pioneer, in the 19th century. Pollan references all three in his latest treatise on food, in which he indicts the American food industry as the cause for our plague of obesity, diabetes, coronary disease, and cancer, to name a few of the serious health issues that now are rampant across the U.S. Let's have a conversation about health care reform, and while having that conversation, let's also place part of the blame squarely where it belongs in this conversation; firmly on the American diet of highly processed, industrial foods.

I'm now more than four months into a journey that I don't plan on turning back from. I've faced up to some truths in my own diet that weren't easy to tackle at first. As weight has come off, and I've become conscious of what I'm putting into my mouth and body, the words of Pollan have resonated with me.

Health is more than how much you weigh, or how many times you exercise each week. Pollan boils his ideas down into their most basic element when he states, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Not a bad manifesto for Americans to adopt.

Maine revisits Prohibition-era

If you've ever attended a wine tasting, you'll know how informative and enjoyable these can be. For someone like me, who never knew much about wine, and whose experiences with the fruit of the vine consisted mainly of toasts with really bad, discounted wines at family gatherings, the past couple of years of occasional tastings accompanying the wine drinker in the family--my wife--have been great. I'm still no expert, but I now can tell the difference by taste between a cabernet, a merlot, or a shiraz.

Recently, Mary informed me about a law that has curtailed these monthly events at wine merchants across the state, including a couple of her favorite wine venues--RSVP, in Portland, and Freeport Cheese and Wine.

A new law, sponsored by Rep. David Webster (D-Freeport) has put a damper on wine tastings at wine merchants and other establishments that held these regularly. The new regulation requires every seller of wine to reapply for permission to hold wine tastings. Since Maine has only five inspectors covering the entire state, it has basically closed down an important element that merchants use in promoting, and ultimately selling wine.

My first forays into the world of wine tasting began about five years ago. A small shop in Freeport (now shuttered), whose owners happened to live in our town, sent out mailings to all the residents in town. Mary dragged me to my first event that July, and I've been a semi-regular at a variety of tastings in Freeport, Portland, and a few other locales since.

While I don't drink wine regularly (I'm a beer kinda' guy), I've come to appreciate a nice red with my steak, and particularly enjoy other varieties of wine with special meals. Sometimes, having a nice chianti Fridays, at pizza night is a great way to wind down after a demanding week.

Mary's been mentioning this issue now for several months, and this morning, she put the Portland Forecaster in my hands, doing something I often do with her--"here, read this article--"offering a better explanation of an issue than I can usually give. Her rationale was wanting me to have a broader sense of the issue with wine tastings, and how they've been shut down by a stupid piece of legislation.

Steve Mistler, who has written for this venerable monthly for quite some time, does a good job showing the idiocy of Webster's bill, and the consequent difficulties this has visited on businesses, many of them Webster's own constituents. What is particularly troubling is that it hurts small businesses particularly hard.

From my own experiences, it's not unusual for Mary and I, after attending a wine tasting, to pick up several bottles of various types of wines that we've just sampled and enjoyed. We might spend $50-100 that particular evening, and bring them home and have them in our wine refrigerator to enjoy with a meal in the future. Others do the same, with a few spending much more than that on wines. It's obvious to see that this legislation removes some serious cash flow from local businesses.

From Mistler's article, I gather that Webster was more concerned about supermarket liquor events where "booze, race cars and scantily-clad women" were going to be present. The article goes on further, doing a good job painting Webster as the "boob" that he is, when it has an additional quote from him saying that "we wanted to give parents a fighting chance to go to a grocery store and not have to wade through a sea of drinking adults." Some of the merchants that Mistler interviewed were none too pleased with Webster's explanation, including Peter Leavitt, of Leavitt & Sons Deli in Falmouth, who characterized the bill as "stupid," and "neo-Prohibitionist."

I understand New England's Puritan past, but good lord, why can't consenting adults be trusted enough to enjoy adult beverages without government nazis and anti-drinking zealots taking that away from us?

Post-election day, 2009

Waking up in the wee hours, I went to Twitter first for my news, and then various news sites, often linked from Tweets--another example of how technology changes the way news travels and how we access it.

Sadly, Maine's opportunity to take the lead and be the first state in the country to endorse gay marriage via referendum was defeated, and the vote wasn't as close as pundits had predicted. One year after California's Proposition 8 struck down gay marriage in the country's largest state, it was hoped that Maine, might counter and endorse same-sex marriage, providing supporters with the political breakthrough they coveted. In the end, the effort was thwarted. Like in California, gay-marriage supporters were outflanked by those wanting to protect "traditional" marriage, and once again, Maine, like California before, with its Proposition 8 referendum, was flooded television ads warning voters that legalizing gay unions could change the way children are taught about marriage in schools, and other misinformation. Even worse, Maine's Catholic Diocese, an organization with no moral authority, used its tax-exempt status and pulpits to lobby against civil rights for all of Maine's citizens.

[Bangor Daily News photo/Bridget Brown]

I found this while surfing for results, a "Love letter to Maine" from a couple that hoped for a different result on Question 1.

Seeking election results, there were some positives for me as the results of the other questions were settled. Both question 2 and question 4, two other measures that I had been following closely were soundly defeated.

Here's the results from Tuesday, with most of Maine's precincts reporting:

Question 1

With 87 percent of precincts reporting, the campaign to overturn Maine’s same-sex marriage law won with 53 percent of the vote vs. 47 percent opposed to Question 1, according to unofficial results compiled by the Bangor Daily News.

Question 2

Question 2, one of two tax initiatives on the ballot, was trailing 74 percent to 26 percent as of 1 a.m. with 87 percent of statewide results tallied and it appears that it will be roundly defeated.

Queston 3

Maine voters rejected a move to repeal the state’s school district consolidation law, an initiative that was of greater concern in Maine's rural areas, than in the more populated parts of the state. It was voted down soundly, with a vote count of 284,117 to 201,203 — or 58.5 percent to 41.5 percent — against repealing the law.

Tuesday's vote appeared to have fallen largely along an urban-rural, north-south divide. Voters in Maine's southern counties --where cities and larger towns were largely exempted from merger requirements -- voted to keep the law.

Northern counties, where dozens of towns found themselves out of compliance with the law -- and now face more than $5 million in penalties starting July 1 -- voted in favor of erasing the mandate.

Question 4

Question 4, known as TABOR II (another in a long line of "taxpayer bill of rights" initiatives), conceded defeat shortly after 10 p.m. on Tuesday. With 87 percent of precincts tallied, the vote was 60 to 40 in oppostion.

Question 5

A proposal to expand the availability of medical marijuana in Maine was headed for passage late Tuesday night.

Question 5 would expand Maine's medical marijuana law to permit marijuana to be used for treatment of many more conditions, and to create a system in which patients can get the drug from nonprofit dispensaries.

With 136 precincts reporting statewide, 22 percent, the proposal was leading 71,620 to 43,244 -- a 62 percent to 38 percent edge.

Maine is one of 13 states that allow the use of medical marijuana, a group that includes Montana, Hawaii, Rhode Island and California.

Question 6

Voters in Maine supported a $71 million transportation bond nearly 2-to-1, according to unofficial voting results compiled by the Bangor Daily News.

With 87 percent of precincts reporting, more than 65 percent of voters said yes to Question 6.

Maria Fuentes, executive director of the Maine Better Transportation Association, was encouraged earlier in the evening with how widespread backing for the bond appeared.

“So far we are seeing that there is support both in rural and urban parts of Maine,” she said. “This year people are very anxious about the economy, but Maine people have been pretty consistent about supporting transportation bonds.”

Mainers have traditionally supported bond issues for transportation, given the state's rural character and dependence on roads, passing every transportation bond issue voted upon over the past 40 years.

Question 7

Question 7 on Maine’s ballot was a constitutional amendment designed to give clerical workers extra time to count signatures on citizen referendums and people’s vetoes.

Given that five of seven questions on this year’s ballot are people’s vetoes or citizen initiatives, each requiring at least 55,087 signatures to be approved as a ballot question, this puts a strain on municipal offices throughout the state as clerks and other personnel must verify each signature on petitions to ensure that they are registered voters. Because petitions are often submitted shortly before they are due, clerical staffers at municipal offices often don’t have the time to count signatures before they are required to return them to the circulators. Question 7 would have increased that time to 10 days. Municipal office staffers currently get five days.

With 87 percent of precincts reporting, 52.2 percent of voters, numbering about 252,332 had voted against the measure as of 1 a.m. On the other side, about 47.8 percent of voters, totaling 230,890 people, supported the measure.

Civics in the age of (dis)information

One of the ongoing issues plaguing American politics, and by extension, any pretense towards dialogue, is the institutionalized ignorance brought about by our continued failure to properly provide instruction to our young in the area of civics. While other advanced societies, mainly western, provide a strong foundation to children in school, the U.S. fails mightily in this area. As a result, we must bear with ignorance at every turn, and often, turn of the radio knob, or channel scroll.

I met a woman a few years ago. We connected on a personal level, mainly through my books, and some of the things I’d written about my former hometown. Initially, our conversations were based on mutual interests and passion for people and for local places. Over time, however, I realized that we had political differences that were impossible to bridge. I was a left-leaning independent voter, with quasi-libertarian tendencies, and she was a right-wing ideologue, supporting people and ideas that I found abhorrent, and intellectually dishonest. Some of these ideas were plain bat-shit crazy.

This isn’t limited to my own small circle of acquaintances and the people I brush up against, either. Take for instance the entire “birther movement.” This group/movement has as their foundation the belief that Mr. Obama is ineligible to be our President because he is not a “natural born” citizen.

I had been hearing rumblings about this from the far right edges of the political landscape, but Elizabeth Kolbert’s article in The New Yorker helped bring it into sharper focus for me. Kolbert cites a poll indicating twenty-eight percent of Republicans surveyed don’t think that Obama was born in the U.S., and another 30 percent said they were unsure. Kolbert’s point, a somewhat scary one, is that over half of Republicans surveyed by this poll doubt the legitimacy of the U.S. government.

Tying this into technology, Kolbert references the writings of Cass R. Sunstein. Sustein taught for 27 years at the University of Chicago Law School. He now heads up the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is known as a prolific legal scholar who has produced a wide swath of written material, including four books on the topic of information, or better, the avalanche of information available via technology. Kolbert uses the term “virtual civics” to classify Sunstein’s four books about issues pertaining to truth, and the idea that if information is good, then more information must be better; or as Sunstein views it, “the Web has a feature that is even more salient: at the same time it makes more news available, it also makes more news avoidable.” Basically, if something doesn’t square with my presuppositions, often wedded to an ideological position, then to hell with it—I’ll just ignore it. Consumers can now filter what they see or hear. (See/hear no evil)

In Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein writes, “I do not mean to deny the obvious fact that any system that allows for freedom of choice will create some balkanization of opinion.” Choice now has been taken to a new level, and the consequences are not positive, in my opinion.

Group polarization—people’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with other likeminded adherents—is becoming increasingly widespread and has infected American politics like the plague. This isn’t the bastion of right-wingers, either. Spend an hour, or so, reading the comment sections of Huffpo, the DailyKos and other well-trafficked left-wing blog sites, and you'll recognize that this tendency exists at both ends of the spectrum.

Because I’ve read Richard Hofstadter extensively, and also because much of what he wrote looks back on a time that now can be viewed within a historical context—helping provide a framework for our current period—I was pleased when Kolbert referenced the following snippet of Hofstadter’s description of an equally dark period, some 45 years ago, during the era of Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter wrote, “I call it (that period, which could easily be describing our current time) the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Never before has the need to beef up civics education been any more urgent than during our present time of disinformation.

You can test your own level of civics literacy here.

Here are my results:

You answered 28 out of 33 correctly — 84.85 %

Average score for this quiz during November: 77.7%
Average score: 77.7%

I missed the following (with their correct answers)-

Answers to Your Missed Questions:
Question #6 - D. establishing an official religion for the United States
Question #7 - D. Gettysburg Address
Question #10 - C. Religion
Question #26 - C. revenue minus expenses
Question #33 - D. tax per person equals government spending per person

Can exercise save us? If so, will we take it up?

Americans are fat, or at least most Americans. In fact, statistics reveal that more Americans are obese than are merely overweight.

While I didn’t qualify for the former category, I certainly was on my way there, until reversing course back in June. My own experience the past 18 weeks has taught me some really important lessons that were validated this morning, when I found a link to this great story in the Financial Times, about Jerry Morris.

Who is Jerry Morris, you ask? Well Jerry Morris is a British researcher who came upon data that indicated an unprecedented number of people dying of heart attacks in Britain. Morris was the one that set up a vast study to look at heart-attack rates in people fromm a variety of occupations, primarily civil servants—schoolteachers, postmen, transport workers, and others.

As he began carefully sorting through this data, just after WWII (there were no computers to do this work back then), Morris had an inkling that heart attack rates were related to occupation. He was particularly interested in the busmen that were part of his data set. Partly this was do to the sample size being large, but also, he noted that the data was particularly telling in that the drivers and conductors were from the same social class, yet, conductors rates of heart attack was half that of the drivers. The only explanation that Morris could come up with was that the drivers were sedentary and the conductors on the double-decker busses had to climb up and down stairs, taking tickets all day.

Today, it’s a given that exercise can help lower the risk of heart disease. In 1949, however, Morris was the first one to make that connection.

The article goes on to mention that Morris began his connection to exercise in early childhood.

“My father used to take me on a four-mile walk from Glasgow once a week, when I was a schoolboy. We used to aim to do the four miles in an hour. If we did that OK, I got an ice-cream. If we did it in even a minute less, I got a choc-ice.”

Morris himself is now 101, and still regularly shows up for work at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where his office is.

The most interesting part of Morris’ study for me was the correlation between heart health and vigorous exercise.

When Morris compiled his research, an inordinate amount of these civil servants were gardeners—91 percent actually—it’s what “kept them sane,” Morris reported. He originally believed this would keep them from heart disease, but he found out that only vigorous exercise—running, biking, playing football, swimming, etc. had the capacity to do that.

In my own case, it wasn’t until I ramped up my activity, as well as becoming more conscious of how many calories I was taking in that I began to see any significant and consistent weight loss. Merely cutting calories wasn’t going to do it. Continuing to overeat also wasn’t helping. It required a combination, but physical activity was certainly a key factor in my success. It will continue to be, if I am to remain successful in keeping the weight (47 pounds as of this morning, btw) off.

I’ve mentioned Tyler before, he of 344pounds.com. He’s now down 123.6 pounds in 40 weeks. How’s he doing it? Yep; reducing calories, and of course, ramping up his physical activity.

Here’s a running routine he’s adopted.

Now that the days are growing shorter, I can’t bike after work. I’ve rediscovered my treadmill in the basement, and most mornings, I’m on it 35-40 minutes before work, and sometimes another 20-30 minutes in the evening.

This week’s been a challenge—for the past two mornings, I’ve had to leave the house before 7:00, headed to early morning appointments for work. Last night, I came home after a very long day and hit the treadmill for 35 minutes. I have been alternating somewhat like Tyler, between walking/running. I’ll usually walk for the first five minutes, starting first at 3.9 and then increasing to 4.1, or 4.1. Then at 5:00, I crank it up to 6.8 and run for two minutes, or sometimes, 2:15, then walk for another two, or three minutes, run two, et cetera. I also try to get a 3-4 minute burst in about midway through, and do some light weighted exercises for my upper body.

After that routine, I came up and hit the Lifecycle for 30 minutes watching the Celtics pregame. Burned about 800 calories, which helped offset the 2,300 calories I consumed for the day.

As Morris’ study shows, obesity, and all the attendant health issues connected to our sedentary lifestyle and lack of activity will continue to plague us in the U.S., as well as developing nations that refuse to learn from our mistakes here in the west.